Forward Deployed Engineer

Harper is an AI-native commercial insurance company in San Francisco. We're not bolting AI onto insurance — we're rebuilding the entire business as software, on a simple bet: turning expert human judgment into compute is one of the largest transitions left to make, and a trillion-dollar industry still run 90% by hand is the place to prove it. We've grown ~100x in the last year and we move at that speed — on-site, in person, long days, very high standards. Almost no one joins Harper for insurance; they join to build the company that replaces how it works.

The role

Turning human judgment into compute isn't one project you finish. It's a standing hunt for leverage that resets every month a new model ships — what was impossible in January is a Tuesday afternoon by June. Someone has to sit on that frontier, inside the actual work, and convert what just became possible into something running in production before anyone else notices the gap. That's this role. You embed with the operators who run Harper — sales, service, underwriting, carrier relations — find the 20% of friction causing 80% of the drag, and build the thing that removes it. The leverage is hiding in plain sight; your job is to see it and ship against it.

What you'll do

• Find the leverage. Sit with operators, watch the work, and surface the automations nobody built because nobody knew they were possible yet.

• Build fast. AI agents, internal tools, workflow automations — prototype in days, ship in weeks. Prototype Monday, ship Tuesday, measure Wednesday.

• Stay on the frontier. New model drops, you're testing it that day and asking what it just made trivial.

• Prove it moved a number. Instrument what you ship, track the result, and show the impact in business terms.

• Teach the company what you learned. Present your findings, shape where the roadmap goes next.

What we're looking for

• 2–5 years building software, with a track record of shipping internal tools or automations end-to-end.

• A technical generalist — Python, TypeScript, SQL — who picks up a new tool in days rather than weeks.

• You write code with AI (Cursor, Claude Code) and can run several coding sessions at once.

• You measure yourself in business outcomes: "conversion went up 15%," not "the feature shipped." You get energy from impact, not from elegant code for its own sake.

• You can walk into a room of non-technical operators, explain why a number moved, and have them trust you.

• Bonus: LLMs, AI agents, or voice AI; a background in operations, sales tech, or workflow automation; prior startup experience.

The reality

This is on-site in San Francisco, in person, long days, high standards. We move at the pace that produced 100x in a year and ~1,000 new customers a month, and a forward-deployed role lives closest to that pace — you'll be in the work, not adjacent to it. The people who want this read that as the draw. If you'd rather own a narrow scope from a distance, this isn't the seat.

Logistics

• Compensation: $140,000–$200,000 base + performance bonus + equity.

• Location: San Francisco, in-office. Based here or willing to relocate.

• Benefits: Uber commuter benefits; breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided; snacks and coffee stocked; free gym membership; health, dental, and vision.

• Process: 15-min founder call → Super Day on-site (technical phone screen first if you're outside SF).

To apply: Send your resume and tell us about something you built that moved a measurable business number.